At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  They were getting ready to toss a towline, when Hill suddenly told Mason he had to run.

  Some baffling balzupped messages had been flying between the ships. Signals were relayed by sleepless men under fire, so words got lost and twisted in translation. Hill had earlier gotten a far-out signal that ordered the long-gone Nigeria to the Orkney Islands, or so he said; but it was from Burrough, ordering the Ledbury back to Gibraltar, and Hill had ignored it.

  Burrough was largely out of touch on the Ashanti and was still unaware that the Manchester had been scuttled some eight hours earlier. As the convoy neared Malta, Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Leatham played a bigger part in its direction, working with others from the damp control room in a well-lit limestone cave with a loft and vaulted ceilings.

  Leatham sent Burrough a message suggesting that Ledbury stop to look for survivors from Manchester, on her way back to Gibraltar. Burrough never got the message but Hill did, and he seized the opportunity to save more men. He steamed at 24 knots to look for Manchester in the Gulf of Hammamet.

  “We relaxed into two watches, to give the hands a chance to bath, eat and sleep,” he said. “I went down to the engine room and boiler room, which I hated doing, and visited the wounded survivors in the sick-bay. Some of the poor chaps were terribly badly burned, just a mass of bandages from head to foot.”

  Hill was napping below when two torpedo bombers appeared in the glare of the afternoon sun; he awoke to the alarm and ran to the bridge to direct the guns through the loud hailer. He ordered the bigger guns to hold fire so the planes would come closer, and together the pom-pom and Oerlikons shot them down. They lay wrecked and sinking on the calm sea, a column of brown smoke rising from each.

  “I was calling through the loudhailer, ‘Bloody good shooting!’ and the whole ship was cheering, slapping each other on the backs,” said Hill. “Then there was a cry, ‘Torpedo!’ and there it was, coming straight for the after part of the ship. The second plane had dropped it while we were shooting down the first. Hard a-port was all I could do, and we waited, our hearts in our mouths, for the explosion.”

  The torpedo passed a few inches astern. The exhilaration was too great, the victory too sweet to go unrewarded.

  “Coxswain, what are the regulations about splicing the mainbrace?” asked Hill, using an expression that dates to the days of Nelson, for tapping the rum.

  “Don’t know, sir. I think it’s when the King visits the fleet or some special occasion.”

  “I think this is a special occasion, Coxswain. Pipe round the ship, ‘Splice the Mainbrace, including all survivors. Stand fast the Hun.’

  “The whole ship was cheering hard, and after this everything went with a swing,” said Hill.

  Forty-five minutes later, with the crew in what Hill called a “happy and piratical mood,” the Ledbury sighted land. Hill thought that some of the Manchester’s crew might be ashore, captured by Arabs or Frenchmen.

  With rum fueling their creative inspiration and courage, the Ledbury’s men came up with a plan: like a scene out of Heart of Darkness, they would charge the coast of Africa, shooting at the sky. The destroyer raced toward shore, with shells from the four-inch guns—Hill called them “Pip,” “Squeak,” and “Wilfred”—flying into the blue sky and exploding in the jungle.

  “We arranged to send a landing party with rifles, revolvers and hand-grenades in the motorboat towing the whaler to form a rearguard or bridgehead, or some such military term. Anyhow, they were to knock off any Frenchmen or Arabs who tried to interfere, and to get the survivors off to the ship.”

  The men had scarcely slept or eaten, and some had washed down uppers with the rum. Hill was wearing a pair of trousers rolled up to the knees (his father had worn them fighting in India) with a faded, ragged blue shirt; “and the sailors were dressed as they pleased,” he said, as they went off on their expedition to liberate the Manchester’s men from their bonds in Africa. All they needed were daggers between their teeth.

  Hill harked back to his chicken-thieving night in port with the doctor—who didn’t think much of this mission. He had watched it organize on deck before returning below to his injured survivors, “shaking his head and muttering about ‘a lot of bomb-happy bloody lunatics,’” said Hill.

  After a couple of hours trolling the coast and shouting into the bushes, they returned to the ship without having found anyone to rescue. The destroyers Eskimo and Somali had been there before Ledbury and picked up survivors in the water. Hundreds more had made it ashore and had already been marched off to be interred.

  As the Ledbury steamed off, there was trouble: the shore station at Hammamet signaled, “Hoist your signal letters.”

  They still had the three-letter signal flying for “Splice the Mainbrace,” so the yeoman lowered it and put an I flag on top of it. The I flag was the first letter in all Italian warship identifications.

  The joke—“I splice the mainbrace”—was lost on the Frenchmen at Hammamet, who challenged the bomb-happy bloody lunatic pirates of Ledbury no more.

  CHAPTER 39 •••

  JUST A MIRAGE

  Winston Churchill slept late that morning, in his luxurious suite in Stalin’s villa. The weather was lovely, so he took a walk around the gardens. He fed some goldfish out of his hand and toured a bomb shelter ninety feet underground—“the latest and most luxurious type,” he said, although he added that he had been more attracted by the goldfish.

  As the morning sun was making the goldfish glisten at Churchill’s fingertips in Moscow, it was rising over the Mediterranean, where the freighter Dorset found itself a stunning thirty miles ahead of the convoy. Her Captain Tuckett had cut a sharper corner than the others and steamed without zigzagging all night. When he looked around and realized that his ship was all alone in broad daylight, he got spooked. Dorset was now within range of the Spitfires from Malta, so he requested air cover; but Admiral Leatham thought the signal could only have come from the Brisbane Star, because no other ship was supposed to be on such an independent course.

  “At 0730 as no fighter escort arrived, I decided to turn back and rejoin the convoy,” reported Tuckett. He was a mere fifty miles from Malta.

  “It was quiet, and there wasn’t another ship in sight,” said Ron Linton, a Dorset gunner. “Somebody said, ‘Look, that’s Malta!’ I reckon we were about thirty miles away. It was so clear; if you know the Mediterranean air, you have unlimited visibility.”

  But Malta was just a mirage.

  “Suddenly, the Dorset turned around, 180 degrees,” said Linton, recalling the unfortunate U-turn from the couch of his home in Brixham on the Devon coast. “We said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ We figured somebody had ordered us back to join the remains of the convoy. Why that order wasn’t disobeyed, I shall never, ever know.

  “We steamed back and made it in two hours. We got in the tail-end Charlie position. That was where the dive-bombers came from, the stern, so they didn’t have to face all the antiaircraft fire.”

  The Malta Spitfires had arrived to provide air cover and were chasing away Stukas. The Dorset promptly shot down a Spitfire.

  “We opened fire with our Oerlikons,” reported Captain Tuckett. “These guns were placed round the ship and were not fitted with any means of communication, hence it was impossible to establish any sort of control. The Officer on the bridge saw Spitfires overhead but was unable to communicate with the gun’s crew, and within a few minutes one of our Spitfires was shot down.”

  “When friendly aircraft is mistaken for hostile, and fire is opened, I think it would reassure the gunners if the aircraft turned away from the ship,” reported the Dorset’s liaison officer. “On one occasion, after a very heavy attack, 3 Spitfires flew over the ship and some of the gunners opened fire. The Spitfires continued over the ship in a steep bank and, although several officers, including myself, ordered ‘Cease Fire,’ we had the great misfortune to shoot one down.”

  If the Australian pilot had lived to tell the story fro
m his side of the bullets, he might have said he simply couldn’t bloody believe they wouldn’t recognize a Spitfire on the tail of a Stuka.

  “We were told if you see a plane, it’s the enemy, so shoot it,” said Linton. “Friendly planes would not fly over the convoy. We believed we had no air cover, so any planes that came over had to be enemy. So we just blazed away as soon as a plane appeared, and that was that.”

  The Dorset paid for her lack of discretion. Fourteen Stukas attacked her, and eleven near misses did her in. “I think probably one of the bombs had penetrated into number four hold,” reported Captain Tuckett. “As the fire was un-get-at-able owing to other cargo being in the way, and was in close proximity to the high-octane petrol, also as the engines and pumps were out of commission, I decided to abandon ship immediately. This was done and the whole ship’s company was taken on board H.M.S. Bramham.”

  “We’d seen what happened to the others, so the order didn’t take long to abandon ship,” said Linton. “It seemed like it happened about five minutes after we had made it back to the convoy. I was in the lifeboat with the second mate and the bosun. One of them said, ‘If I could find the bastard that gave the order to come back, I’d shoot him.’”

  “The Dorset’s crew abandoned ship at once and had no desire to go back to her,” reported Captain Baines of the Bramham. He tried to tow the Dorset with his destroyer but stopped when a Ju 88 attacked. Later four more Junkers attacked, and a direct hit put Dorset afire. Along came the U-boat of none other than Kapitan Rosenbaum, who had been tailing the convoy for fifty-four hours after sinking the Eagle. Rosenbaum’s log claims the Dorset for U-73, with a torpedo at 1848.

  “Gradually a majestic looking ship went lower and lower, and by 1955 Dorset was no more,” said Dickens. “What a pathetic sight that was. She went down with colors flying, the red duster had done its best. There now remained Ohio. By hook or by crook she must be brought in.”

  Spitfires and Beaufighters from Malta, four or five at a time, had taken over the defense of the convoy; they were flying on fuel that had come from Alexandria in minesweeping submarines. The merchant gunners now knew that friendly fighters were in the sky, but they were hopelessly jumpy and beyond exhausted, and had seen too much to take chances. And because the ships still had no VHF radio contact with the fighters, the pilots kept their distance; they were able to engage enemy bombers only before the bombers moved in on the ships to attack.

  The morning sky was full of dogfights. Admiral Burrough said the Malta fighters “performed a magnificent job of work throughout the day,” and Admiral Leatham called it “a very remarkable achievement.” Stukas, Ju 88s, and Messerschmitts, as well as Thunderbolts and Flying Buffalos, fell flaming and smoking from the sky, nose-diving, spiraling, and floating gently into the water.

  All the stars came out from Malta, both RAF and Fleet Air Arm pilots. The veteran Dickie Cork, a Hurricane ace who had flown off the Indomitable, shot down six enemy planes, either alone or with other fighters, and earned a Distinguished Service Order Medal to go with his Distinguished Flying Cross. Adrian Warburton, DSO, DFC (U.K.), DFC (U.S.), the baddest of the bad boys and rock-star reconnaissance pilot, a hero of Taranto, searched for enemy planes between Sardinia and Cape Bon, his fifth recon flight in two days—Alec Guinness would play a character like him in the movie The Malta Story, but it could have been James Dean. There was also Group Captain Walter Churchill, DSO, DFC, who would be shot down and killed over Sicily two weeks later. And the inimitable Canadian George “Buzz” Beurling, DSO, DFC, DFM, Malta’s top ace by a mile, with 261/3 kills during his ten months there in 1942.

  “We tussled it out with the Jerries and the Eyeties,” said Beurling, who shot down a Ju 88 with two others, at 18,000 feet. “That’s where we found our lonely Ju, cruising around all by himself.”

  “I yelled into the mike: ‘Look out! Here I come!’ and whizzed down, putting a two-second burst into the starboard engine as I went past. The engine fell off. The bomber burst into flames and down it went. Not one of its four-man crew got a chance to bale. We sure had let daylight into the Ju!”

  A Beaufighter with an American pilot and Scottish observer was hit, and the men bailed out. The American was lost—the only pilot killed on the day, by the enemy—but the Scot floated in his Mae West until dark, when he was picked up by two Italians who had bailed out of their Stuka and inflated their backpack dinghy. The trio drifted together for sixty hours, sharing food, water, and pantomimed stories. A German flying boat picked them up, and the Scot, Jock McFarlane, was taken captive. Forty-five years after the war, he and Nicola Patela, the Italian gunner from the Stuka, met again in England.

  As the Ohio was being bombed that morning, the destroyer Penn was skipping along in the sunny sea at 30 knots with the Santa Elisa survivors on board. They had to compete for deck space with the survivors from the Empire Hope. The injured were treated for burns with an ointment containing gentian violet, slathered on by the sick bay doctors, who sent their patients back out in the sun because there was nowhere else to put them. The decks were clogged with moaning masses of purple ooze.

  “The ointment was pretty unsightly,” said the Ledbury’s Dr. Nixon. “It made them blue. They looked like Indians that had been painted in their warpaint. Poor devils.

  “There’s a limit to how much your body can be burned and survive, and it was too much for some of them. But it’s amazing, really, how much men can stand. Some of them must have been in terrible pain. All one could do was keep them full of morphine.”

  “The crew of the Penn did everything they could to try to make us comfortable,” said Lonnie Dales, whose broken forearm was a slight injury compared to others’. “But when you have a couple hundred survivors on board a destroyer, there isn’t much room to turn around. I don’t think anybody who was picked up by the Penn got any rest, because there wasn’t any place to rest, except to sit on the steel deck.”

  Like hurricane victims in a bread line, the survivors stood in a long, winding queue for a plate of porridge, a biscuit, and a cup of tea to wash it down. “All the whiskey, and the food and everything was left behind in the lifeboats,” said Larsen. “We didn’t get much to eat on the destroyer.”

  Follansbee suddenly remembered that he had also left behind his briefcase containing $2,000 of the ship’s cash, which they would need for food if they ever got to Malta. Larsen changed the subject to the speed of the Penn before the others stuffed Follansbee into a depth-charge launcher and fired it.

  “Thirty knots is really moving,” he said. “It would take a pretty lucky shot to hit this baby.”

  “You spoke too soon,” said Captain Thomson. “We’re slowing down.”

  The Penn approached the Ohio, which was dead in the water.

  “What in the hell?” said Larsen. “How did she get this far? I thought she was hit.”

  The tanker’s paint was scorched and blistered, her superstructure scarred by shrapnel, her funnels riddled with bullet holes. There was a cavern in her foredeck, and daylight glared through the hole in her hull. “A dive-bomber had crashed on her foredeck, and we could make out the wreckage of the plane even from our distance,” said Follansbee.

  The Penn circled Ohio for two hours. “Suddenly the loudspeaker system blared forth a startling announcement,” said Follansbee. “‘Survivors will stand by aft to assist with towlines.’

  “‘Holy Christ!’ I exclaimed. ‘That doesn’t mean…’

  “‘Yes, it does,’ replied Larsen. ‘We’re going to tow that tanker into Malta.’”

  “We gave the Penn a 10-inch manila tow rope from forward,” said Captain Mason, “but the attempt to tow from ahead was hopeless, as the ship just turned in circles, finally parting the tow rope. I signaled the Penn that the only hope of towing the Ohio was from alongside, or with one ahead and one astern to steady the ship.”

  “It seemed impossible under the present conditions that any progress could be made unless some other ships could assist in t
he tow,” said Lieutenant Barton, the liaison officer. “It seemed that the ship was nothing more than a sitting target.”

  “We were still being bombed whilst stopped,” reported Mason. “As it was useless the crew staying on board and risking life, I called up the destroyer to ask if he would take off my crew until more assistance was available, to which he agreed, and at 1400 HMS Penn came alongside and took off the whole crew.”

  The Ohio was abandoned.

  CHAPTER 40 •••

  LAME DUCK OFF LINOSA

  If Captain Mason hadn’t met Captain Thomson at the skipper’s meeting on the day Operation Pedestal left the Clyde, he met him now, in the wardroom of the Penn. Lord knows what they might have said to each other. They’d scarcely slept for three days. They were stubbled, scorched, smoky, and oily. Mason’s hands were freshly bandaged—his first stop on the Penn had been sick bay, to have his own burns treated. Their ships had been bombed and torpedoed, and flames had swallowed large parts of them. The Santa Elisa had been obliterated, and the Ohio was slowly sinking. They’d heard the harrowing screams of men dying in the burning water. They’d been deafened by days and nights on the bridge with guns going off in their ears, and half choked from inhaling smoke and fumes from burning oil, kerosene, and aviation fuel. Eleven days earlier they’d been bragging about the power and grandeur of their new ships, and now they had abandoned them.

  One of the Penn’s junior officers came into the wardroom. “Captain Swain would like to see you sir, if you don’t mind,” he said to Mason.

  Swain had sent a message to Burrough at 1350 that said, “Can not tow by myself. She will not steer.” He received a reply from Admiral Leatham at 1552 that said, “You must make every endeavor to tow.”

  But the Penn was only a 1,500-ton destroyer, and the Ohio was drawing thirty-seven feet and adding another foot every two hours. “The Ohio was damaged so badly where the torpedo hit,” said Larsen. “She was still taking on water, and she had a big steel plate sticking out the port side, so you couldn’t steer.”